We got rid of plastic and use wood now.

(We’re looking for a picnic table for our daughter.)

We have our bedroom, a small sleep room for Little Miss, a changing/play room and a storage/guest room. We have minimal furniture and regularly expunge clutter (unlike our neighbors, we use our garage for car storage). The entertainment center is in our bedroom. Book and display shelves are in our storage room (part of our babyproofing plan). We replaced the cardboard boxes in our closets with 12 gallon heavy duty plastic stacking bins. That drastically increased our storage capability.

When we hosted our first mommies group we heard a few comments that our place looked like a daycare center.

The family and living rooms have been taken over by Little Miss. We just split our large playpen into in two, one for each room, though the playpen doors are usually left open. The family room has the small picnic table. The living room has the Mambo Combo play tent (the Combo has three play pieces that are impossibly large if used together, so we just use the tent right now).

We sell older baby toys to a local baby thrift shop for store credit. Because I buy a lot of like-new toys at garage sales, I often turn a small profit. Yesterday we sold a plush zebra rocking horse for $12 that I bought for $5. The zebra looked really cool, but was also large and redundant because Miss ended up preferring a hokey wooden horse someone made from a build-it-yourself kit.

(Thrift shops are a great resource. They have so many parents trying to unload their stuff that the stores pick only the best of the best to sell to you.)

I’ll write a separate post about your garage sale question.

Playpen:
http://www.thingamababy.com/baby/2005/07/review_little_p.html

Play mats:
http://www.thingamababy.com/baby/2005/07/preview_foam_pl.html

Mambo Combo:
http://www.thingamababy.com/baby/2005/09/review_mambo_co.html

I’ll write up a response to your garage sale question as a post for tomorrow. Garage sailing is serious business.

You are always seeming to find good items at garage sales. What type of families are putting up these garage sales? Lower class? Middle or Upper class? Around my area many of the lower/middle class folks put their junk out for me to browse through. Higher/middle class tends to have HOA which causes them to have neighborhood sales like twice a year. Share your secrets.